My newly completed novel is The Fall of the Berlin Wall, about what happened to characters from my Hungry Generations fifteen years later; it's about musicians and particularly the intense, irrepressible daughter of the legendary pianist at the center of the previous novel. My 2015 novel, The Ash Tree, was published by West of West Books in conjunction with the April 24, 2015 centenary of the Armenian genocide; it's about an Armenian-American family and the sweep of their history in the twentieth century - particularly from the points of view of two women in the family.

There are three other novels of mine, One is Pathological States, about a physician's family in L.A. in 1962, which is as yet unpublished. Another is Hungry Generations, about a young composer's friendship in L.A. with the family of a virtuoso pianist, published on demand by iUniverse. A Burnt Offering - a fable (a rewriting and expansion of my earlier Acts of Terror and Contrition - a nuclear fable) is my political novella about Israel and its reactions to the possibility of a war with Iran (with the fear that it will be a nuclear war).From a reader's review:"At times the reader races ahead to find out the fate of the cast of characters and the fate of nations. At others, the reader is stopped mid-page to consider the paradoxes of the nuclear world and the world of realpolitik. This is an important, timely book that deserves a wide audience." For a fuller description of them, look for the relevant blog posts below or click on one of the Amazon.com links. KINDLE editions of these novels are also available.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Beethoven viii (on the late Beethoven sonata no. 30 in E)

The opus 109 piano sonata no. 30 in E major, a
beautifully lyrical yet austerely “stripped down” late Beethoven work,
withholding the loud conclusive and concussive sounds of earlier works; it was
composed about six years before Beethoven died. This sonata is akin to the
final piano sonata, opus 111, about which I commented in my Beethoven posts v
and vi, and akin also to the penultimate sonata opus 110 which I tried to evoke
in my previous post – vii.

The opus 109 sonata partakes of the features I tried to
describe of “the sublime” in my last post. It was Egon Petri’s recording that
first introduced me to the sonata; its clarity of phrasing and structure were
the work of a master teacher, profoundly illuminating and prompting me to try
exploring the music at the piano (someday I hope to discuss a great Roland
Barthes essay examining the logic and value of the amateur sight-reading of
Beethoven’s sonatas). Its first theme always reminded me of the Scherzo of the
last quartet – such a fleet yet contemplative theme, so full of potential
nuances. I more fully heard those subtleties of “breathing,” of phrasing and
emphasis, when I listened to Rudolf Serkin’s wonderful recording from the early
sixties; I admired the performance’s sense of being in process, of hewing the
phrases and tones from the music’s edifice. His is the opposite of an
unfinished performance; rather it is that Serkin abjures any impression of
surface smoothness and focuses on the larger formal arc or shape of a sequence
or movement. Every small, intentional strangeness of emphasis or slight
fracturing of rhythm in the initial statement of the opus 109 theme calls
attention to the wondrous promise of the larger form, of the highest level of
coherence and meaning.

In short, the listener is grateful for the signs of
struggle and even estrangement here; they indicate the presence of meanings and
emotions below the beautiful ordered surfaces of the music. This effect
achieved in Serkin’s performances of the late Beethoven sonatas is related to
what I tried to say about the sublime – that there is in late Beethoven a level
of aesthetic experience that moves beyond the perception of conventional beauty
to the experience of an open-ended baring the building materials of the music, where
the unexpected rifts become openings for unexpected, undreamt-of expression,
akin to the sight of the Matterhorn and in its own way stirring awe and
inciting the imagination, uncapturable, evanescent, and transcendent.

After less than twenty seconds of the initial lyric
melody, the grand gesture of a loud and sweeping broken chord occurs in the
treble, a sort of step up Matterhorn: a startling block of sound followed lower
in pitch by another stamped chord, and yet the fullest, stamped loudness never
occurs, for the grandness immediately evanesces into gentle, resolving chords;
then within seconds, the pattern is repeated, except that the resolving chords
are now made to stretch toward a new harmony and a swift rhythm in
thirty-second note triplet arpeggios which sweep down the keyboard – but again
the soft gentling occurs, even in these fleet triplets. This pattern keeps pulsing
until it gives way once more to the beautiful lyric melody of the sonata’s
opening. In Serkin’s wonderful performance, all these sequences, whether
stamped or softened or stretched, partake of the special improvised angularity
which is a sign of the uncanny presence of the sublime.

The middle movement of opus 109 is a stormy scherzo, a
very fast march, but like Mahler’s marches, it undercuts itself with off-beat
emphases and strange syncopations and, most of all, through the continual
triplet tread, so that three note units seem not to spring forward but to turn
back in a sort of contrapuntal conversation with itself – this is most evident about twenty
seconds into the movement at bars 16 and following. Similarly, the harmony
remains ambiguous; for all the stridency of the initial e minor theme, the
movement keeps refusing to offer a conclusive assertion of e minor closure.
Even the final bars, wavering between the conclusive and the exploratory, play with modulations to the G major complement to the movement’s key of e
minor, then C major, and then some insistence on the unstable dominant seventh
chord before the final e minor chord.

But it’s the final movement of opus 109 that is a most
impressive instance of Beethoven’s late style. It is in variation form, like
the final movement of opus 111 and the world-encompassing Diabelli set, opus
120, and I’ll later offer some thoughts about the form itself. But first, there
are some wonderful YouTube videos of a Daniel Barenboim master class for
Jonathan Biss playing the opus 109 sonata, particularly its last movement (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHgfuf-Nn-Q
is the second in the relevant video sequence). Biss plays the theme with a
beautiful sense of the structure of phrases, always alert to nuance and to the
quieting approach to each cadence (there are some wonderful added details in
Serkin’s similar performance of the theme, for example the B octaves struck to ring
out the statement of the subsidiary theme after the double bar at bar 8). Then,
with the first variation, Barenboim interrupts to call attention to the odd
angularity and uniqueness of the sequence, so disconnected from the sixteen
bars stating the theme. This oddity appears in the stretching of rhythm and
phrase, in the ornamental double grace notes or thirty-second notes packed in
before the emphatic initial beats of bars and in those beats themselves with
their ringing tones, struck high above the previous range of pitches in the
music. This variation’s taking apart of the theme, stretching it almost beyond
recognition, is a first step in exposing and breaking apart the theme’s
essential elements. (The fifth variation even recruits an antique fugue further
to unfold the process.) This breaking down to essences and then reconstituting
them in an improvisatory release of new music represents a process at the core
of late Beethoven and is most evident in the final, sixth variation (beginning
at bar 153).

Here in the sixth variation, the theme is reduced to its
simplest common denominator, the most basic chords for two bars, and then the
quarter notes are doubled, then multiplied by three, then by four, and then by
eight. Finally, trills are introduced in the middle, then in the bass, and then
in the high treble, as a sort of alert or alarm ringing out to accompany the
continuing deconstruction of the original chords. And at the end all the trill
and blur of thirty-second notes quiets down to give way to the moving simple
restatement of the original theme, out of which an entire world of possibility
had developed.

Variation form as Beethoven employed it in the last
decade of his life differs from his use of it earlier. In the great c minor
variations, opus 35, for example, there is an eloquent propulsiveness (and even
a fugue there also) yielding breathtaking concluding cadences; even the tragic
slow variations offer a tight dramatic structure. The purposeful momentum and
focus on powerful drama give way to the new use of variations I’ve tried to
describe in the previous paragraphs (and perhaps at a later point I’ll try to
describe some of what the Diabelli set achieves). Of course, the fact that
Beethoven continued to explore this form suggests the significance for him of
the process of growth from an original germ of musical material; the organic
germination process is at the core of his music, even as in the late period, it
yields more and more open-ended deconstructions of exposed conventions, inspired
explorations of abstract structures, and the improvisatory revivifying of dead
or dying forms.

Buy "Hungry Generations" here - a novel about L.A. and European expatriates living there.

Purchase "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music" here.

The Ash Tree - a novel

About Me

"The Ash Tree" about a family of Armenian-Americans, from 1915 to the early 1970s, is being published April 24, 2015, on the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. My 2004 novel "Hungry Generations" is about the encounter between a young composer in L.A. in the 70s and the family of a great virtuoso pianist, who knew Schoenberg and Stravinsky there in the 40s. Also, there's my critical book on modern fiction and music, "Fullness of Dissonance" (1994), as well as various stories and articles in print. My novella and story collection "Acts of Terror and Contrition" was published in 2011. Current projects: "Pathological States" (an unpublished novel), "Conrad in the Twentieth Century" and "Beethoven and modernity" (both non-fiction books). I'm married to the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick, whose paintings are on the cover of three of my books. You can contact me either by leaving a comment on a post or at danielcmelnick@gmail.com.